Tiny Bots to Scour Big Blue Ocean

Joanna Glasner
01.15.02

In today's world, where a 3-pound laptop ranks as a pretty remarkable feat of miniaturization, the concept of creating tiny robots to scour the ocean for dangerous microorganisms may seem like the stuff of science fiction.

Over the next several years, however, a group of researchers at the University of Southern California are hoping to bring that seemingly farfetched vision closer to reality.

With a recent $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, a team of robotics engineers, biologists and computer scientists from the university are planning to test the feasibility of using microscopic robots to ferret out harmful algae that propagate in coastal waters.

The project will focus initially on detecting the organism that causes brown tide -- a nasty algae growth that has been know to spring up along the coasts of New Jersey and Long Island.

"What happens is that people don't really know when these organisms develop or under what conditions they develop," said Ari Requicha, director of USC's Laboratory for Molecular Robotics and one of the project's leaders.

"It's believed that you have to understand the environmental conditions that are relevant at the scale of the organism," he said.

Initially, researchers plan to conduct experiments using a scanning probe microscope, a device containing a sharp tip of nanometer-scope proportions (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter) that can be used to create images of and interact with organisms at the atomic level.

By applying an antibody to the tip of the scope that attaches to the brown tide algae, it should be possible to detect and identify the microorganism within a larger sample, Requicha said.

"Bringing this technology to a liquid environment is something that's very new," said David Caron, a USC professor of biology and co-investigator on the project. Caron recently created the antibody that binds to the algae that produces brown tide.

In the first phase of the project, Caron said it's unlikely anyone will actually be performing experiments in the ocean. The plan is to conduct detection research in the more controlled environment of a laboratory tank.

As for the robotics end of the experiment, Requicha cautions that the technology for creating microscopic bots -- though progressing rapidly -- is still probably at least a decade away from fruition. However, he views the scanning probe microscope test as a first step on the way to determining the kind of sensing capabilities the bots would need to detect the presence of harmful algae.

As an ultimate goal, Requicha said the plan is to engineer anywhere from several thousand to several million micron-scale robots (a micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter) capable of detecting dangerous algae growths. He stops short of setting a date for achieving this target, noting that the state of nanotechnology's development is about where the Internet was in the late 1960s.

Concurrent with the engineering research, a team of USC computer scientists will also work on whether this still-hypothetical swarm of micro-bots could actually be networked to communicate in an orderly fashion.

"We can't sit around and not do anything until there's a nanorobot," Requicha said. "So, we're doing a lot of software development that works on coordination and all these other issues."